At Jordan Con, I did a photo shoot with my wonderful friend Kathy of A Life Condensed Photography, so all the beautiful shots below are thanks to her!

The Jordan Con hotel actually has a lot of beautiful greenery and nature-ish looking areas, which is totally useless when you are portraying a character in a red sun / ash falling / semi-apocalyptic wasteland, so we did our best.

Spikes going through my head!

Feeling pretty, might kill some Mistborn later, IDK

One change the final dress needs – the hem ended up an inch or so too long, but it’s going to be a pain to detach at the waist, take the skirt up, do the pleats again, and reattach. Or maybe I’ll just wear it with heels (which spoiler, I did at Costume College, minus the eye spikes).

A few more for fun:

Pre-judging selfie, with eye tattoos (eyeliner)

Found an Elend to murder!

Hey, even Steel Inquisitors get hungry.

This costume was so much fun to wear and make, and it nabbed me Best Workmanship in the costume contest, which is basically second to Best in Show! Woohoo! (But Best in Show, I’m still gunning for you…)

While I am dedicated to my costume art, impaling my skull was slightly further than I wished to go, so I needed to have a way to stick bits on the front and back of my head to look like an impaled spike.

A friend of mine had previously done a Steel Inquisitor with toilet paper tubes and sunglasses so that gave me a place to start. His sunglass lenses ended up a bit reflective (and therefore not looking as much like solid metal) so my plan was to go with mesh over the openings instead. Construction pics ahead!

Pieces of paper tubes with rounded edges, which were meant to fit into the inner and outer curves of my eyes. The outer edge needed to be a lot deeper than I expected to fit flush. Made two for each eye in order to have backups!

Painted silver and mesh glued to the opening.

Crayola model magic around the edges to smooth and hide the join.

Glued to my eye socket with eyelash glue for a test run. After 30 minutes it still felt totally secure so I called it good! I could see pretty easily through the mesh.

The whole thing painted silver with a bit of black wash to make them look like weathered steel. The spike tips for the back of the head were formed entirely out of Model Magic and glued to hairclips.

For weapons, Steel Inquisitors carry obsidian axes while Mistborn use glass daggers. I split the difference with obsidian daggers. Luckily these are readily available on etsy these days due to obsidian daggers being a Big Thing in Game of Thrones!

I bought two but unfortunately didn’t think to say the dagger sheathes should be mirror images (you’d think it would be obvious…) and there wasn’t time to order sheathe or make one. So I quick and dirty cut the belt loop off, flipped it over, and used another piece of leather to glue the pieces together.

Fix from the back

And from the front! Looks pretty good if you don’t look closely.

Unfortunately this glue ended up ripping when I actually put the daggers on the belt the first time and I had about 5 minutes to sew through it with giant honking stitches before judging, but the dagger blocks the stitching when it’s in the sheath.

I made a belt using the dress fabric lined with a bit of crinoline for stiffness. It’s machine topstitched on the long edges, and is whip-stitched closed by hand on the backside. I added a rosette (matching the one on the bertha) to cover the hooks & eyes, and used decorative vintage black buckle on the front.

And that was the whole outfit just in time for Jordan Con! Final pictures in the next post!

So evening bodice. The base for these are basically all the same from 1830-1860 (princess seams or darts in front, princess seams in back. Hooks & eyes or eyelets in the back closure). Differences over the years look like whether there are points in front or back, what the bertha situation is, what the decorations and sleeves look like, etc.

I took my 1830s bodice pattern and brought it a bit forward in time to 1840s by adding a point in front. (Funnily enough, this started out life as the 1850s Truly Victorian evening bodice pattern. I first made it as an actually-1850s-bodice, sent it back in time to 1830s improving the fit along the way, then took that better-fitting one to use here. It’s easier to fix style lines than fit which is why I went with the most recent one).

Since my 1830s bodice was straight at the waist, and my 1850s bodice had a point in the front and back, this one went right in the middle of that transition with a straight back but and pointed front.

You would think that since this is the third time I’m using this pattern it would fit right out the gate right?

The back was fine, but in lengthening the front I ended up making 3 mocks to get the darts to be shaped and positioned properly

Here’s the first version. It fit, but the darts are so totally wrong (although hard to see here). It’s fun to progress as a seamstress, because a few years ago I would have called this good!

Closeup of the mockup, but drawing in pen where I want them to be (that rightmost black line is a thread not pen):

The idea was to move them way closer to the center, such as in this line drawing of an 1840s dress from 19th Century Costume in Detail:

Apparently I didn’t take any pictures of the second attempt. The darts were better, but the angle wasn’t quite right. I really wanted this to look good, so I actually made a third version to make sure the darts were exactly where I wanted them.

Looks like I also lowered the neckline. I also raised the waist at the sides to make the front look more pointy.

Final version of the pattern. You can see all the way on the right one of the original darts, and just how far they moved over and the slight changes.

I left a ton of seam allowance at the sides, because I’ve previously had issues where the waist was too small after taking into account petticoats and skirt. I both added a bit to the side seam and left myself an inch of seam allowance, and still ended up with a seam allowance of only 3/8″ to make sure the skirt fit over everything!

So then decoration. A plain bodice is a) not historically accurate and b) boring. The decor on a bodice is colloquially called a bertha, although I’m not sure when that term came into being. Let’s do a quick trek through the evolution of those –

In the early 1830s they start out as just being cut in one with the bodice, perhaps in pleats or gentle ruching. I’m calling this a proto-bertha, as it clearly evolved into what costumers think of as a bertha.

Then in the late 1830s and 1840s they realize it’s a pain to pleat down that extra fabric and make it even (ok that’s just me editorializing) and it’s easier to cut a separate piece and attach it at the shoulders. So you have a time frame where the pleaty-bits are separate decoration in the front of the bodice but the back is left plain as before.

This gown shows very clearly a separate piece for the front, which attaches at the shoulder seams:

Then Victorians went “hold up, MOAR STUFF is better!!” and extended the bertha to be some nice back decoration as well, in which case it is always cut as a separate unit that is just attached on top of the bodice in some way. Here is the back of an utterly frooftastic dress:

As my gown is 1840s, I went with the middle technique of a bertha-esque piece on just the front, attached at the shoulder seams. (I had already done a pleated front for my 1830s dress and a front/back wraparound bertha with my 1850s dress and I like trying new things). I had thought about doing something different than faking a million pleats with bias strips as that is what I did for the 1850s bodice, but I didn’t have enough lace to use for this in addition to the skirt and didn’t feel like buying more. So a million bias strips it was.

3 strips later is when I started cursing myself for marking off 10 bias strips instead of 8…

I added a little tab thingy to hide the bertha front seam (Janet Arnold has one of these), since my pleats didn’t end up matching perfectly:

Um.

Yeah it ended up looking a bit more phallic than I intended. I added this rosette at the top to try and mitigate that.

Great, now it’s decoratively phallic?

That was the best I could do. And hopefully my friends have less dirty minds than me and won’t see it?

HAHAHAH NOPE OK THEN MOVING ON.

The pieces were all flatlined with a mishmash of stiff cottons in my scrap bin. I have a little bit of actual glazed cotton which would be the proper lining, but I’m saving that for a future dress as I was already taking shortcuts and trying to make this dress on the cheap, not the accurate.

For details, I basically piped all the things! Victorians loooved piping. They were like software engineers who discover machine learning and decide to use it for ALL THE THINGS even where it just makes your life more difficult and isn’t really necessary.

So we have a piped center front seam and piped neckline:

A piped side back seam:

A piped shoulder seam and a piped armscye:

I love this detail shot so much. Bonus of sleeve lace basted onto the sleeve.

Because I wanted to do this dress without metal (because it would be a really bad idea to fight other Mistborn while wearing metal) I made lacing holes for the closure. Here you can see the difference between the first lacing hole (top) and subsequent ones (beneath). I’ve done enough handsewn eyelets that I don’t tend to bother with a practice one anymore, which is why the first one looks like it does.

No pictures of the entire finished bodice, so that will have to wait until the post with pics of the whole ensemble!

Skirt time! 1840s skirts are just big rectangles so no pattern needed.

I cut three 40″ long panels from my fabric to make a skirt around 135″ around (and making sure to leave enough length for the hem and the waist).

Skirt seam where I remembered to leave an opening for the pocket up top!

I decided to get all fancy and make a proper placket for the closure instead of having it meet edge to edge (which ended up being a sizable mistake later on. The simple closure would have been better). I can never remember how to do a placket off the top of my head, but Historical Sewing has excellent instructions.

Placket from the outside

Placket from the inside. I used my serger wherever I could on this project for speed!

Next up, the hem. A Victorian skirt always has more hem treatment than just folding up the bottom twice. Here I used a facing of stiff cotton (it would be a polished cotton or linen in period, I used some quilting cotton I had laying around) with an interlining of very stiff crinoline for body. This helps hold out the skirt hem.

Facing is sewn on right side to right side. Then on the inside I attached the crinoline strip to the facing.

Then the whole unit can be flipped up and sewn down.

Normally I would slipstitch that seam by hand so it wouldn’t show on the outside, but I knew my trim would cover it.

Oh speaking of the skirt trim –

This shouldn’t have been this complicated. I wanted to do lace tiers like this inspiration pic. (Black on black, I am so goth y’all)

It turns out finding 8″ wide black lace that doesn’t look a) heinously cheap or b) extremely modern without being c) extremely expensive doesn’t really exist. If this was my dream dress I might have splurged for the good lace from Elizabeth Emerson but I’m not that into 1840s, and I was trying to keep this dress on the cheap (hence why I used cotton sateen in the first place, and not silk).

I ended up buying white lace and hoping it would dye black. Facebook seemed rather pessimistic about this (apparently black is a hard color to actually achieve) but I had already bought 12 yards of this stuff (as it claimed to be cotton). That 12 yards already cost more than the dress fabric…

I used one bottle of Rit black and one packet of Dylon (this was not a strategy, it was choosing randomly from the dyes at JoAnn). This all simmered in the dye pot for 1.5 hours, then sat in there with the heat off for another 1.5 hours while I had dinner and put the baby to bed and cleaned up.

And hey, it turned out perfect!

Shown over white fabric and black fabric.

In an ideal world I would have liked a lace without flowers, given that flowers didn’t exist during the Mistborn timeline on Scadrial, but lol that was never going to happen given how difficult it was to find this lace to begin with.

Three tiers carefully spaced and sewn on.

Because the top edge of the lace wasn’t a pretty finished edge, it would need to be covered up by some kind of trim.

Yeah that failed epically. It turns out that pinked edges – which work fantastically as an edge finish on a tightly woven fabric like silk taffeta, are a fraying hot mess on cotton sateen. I also tried pleating it (similar to 18th century trim) but it was also an uggo-fest.

Big pile of nope right here. The gathered zig-zag attempt on the left, knife pleats on the right.

I raged for a while, and tried to find something online I could use. Silk ribbon would be pretty, but I didn’t want to use it flat, and if I needed to pleat or gather it, the math was something like 3 tiers X 3.75 yards-per-tier X gathering it in a 2:1 ratio = 22.5 yds + a bit extra for screwups = SO MUCH MORE MONEY THAN THE ENTIRE REST OF THE DRESS UGH.

So I sucked it up hard and knew I was going to throw time instead of money at this problem and make my own trim. I cut a bieber-billion strips of the sateen, and hemmed them all on both sides. I wanted to use my rolled hem foot (you can see how desperate I was to consider using that devilish widget) but I only have one meant for finer fabrics and the cotton sateen didn’t fit through it. Then I ran all hemmed strips through the ruffler foot on my machine (and it turns out buying a new ruffler foot for my Bernina did practically cost more than the rest of the dress combined. But hey at least that’s an investment for the future? I have a Singer ruffler foot for my old White machine, but it was hella janky when I tried it out and I didn’t want to risk it eating up my fabric strips.)

A test. Hemmed strip on the left, unhemmed strip with a small pleat every stitch in the middle, and unhemmed striped with a big pleat every 6 stitches on the right. I went with the middle sample option (but hemmed).

Then I handsewed all those suckers onto the dress. It’s theoretically possible to do the ruffling/attaching in one step by machine, but I couldn’t get good enough control and I wanted this to be pretty!

To be a Google shill for a moment – this is how good the Pixel 3 camera is, to get this kind of black-on-black detail work.

And it was pretty! A bug which became a feature is that the double folded hem on the strips added a lot of bulk, that made the gathered strip do this zig-zag/wavy-ish thing seen here, as opposed to lying flat like the test sample. But I like the effect and it helped to hide that the gathering was done by machine.

Last, this dress was gonna have pockets. Duh. I know JordanCon costume contest judging takes 2 hours and I needed a place to stash my badge, phone, hotel key, accessories, and mini flask.

According to this nifty article from the V&A, early 19th century pockets were very similar to their 18th century counterparts, and this image from the Workwoman’s Guide backs that up.

Screenshot of Pockets from the Workwoman’s Guide. They are still separate and not part of the skirt.

I used my 18th century pocket pattern and made two. The openings are bound with dark gray rayon seam binding since I didn’t feel like cutting matching bias tape.

These were whipstitched to the inside of the skirt waistband after it had been attached to the bodice (the very last thing I did actually, Friday morning of the convention in my hotel room).

Apparently I don’t have any pictures of just the skirt by itself, so I’ll get into how it attached to the top (and what a mess that was, thanks to my pesky placket) when I talk about the bodice!

I never liked the bumroll I originally made for my Ada Lovelace gown, as it gave too much of a shelf-appearance instead of gently enhanced backside (apparently I never took any photos of it, so just imagine your typical Elizabethan Renn Fair shelf-butt).

Luckily, a lot of other people got into 1830s recently, and Abby from American Duchess made a great Youtube tutorial for making a bustle (pattern included!) from the Workwoman’s Guide. This is basically as historically accurate as you can get, since the pattern and instructions are from 1838.

This isn’t a giant Victorian bustle; just some gathered fabric with cording in the hem to add a bit of oomph.

I used some (non accurate) canvas from the stash that I had bought from Fabmo for $2 (I like having canvas on hand for corset mockups). It might be cotton, but who knows, I didn’t bother burn testing it. When unfolding the yardage it had an Ikea label in the middle, so I guess this is an Ikea bustle! (Anyone know how to say bustle in Swedish?)

And here you can see the difference it makes under the 3 petticoats (corded, plain, and tucked).

Before, a sad limp backside:

After, take your backside from sad to fab! (And if you order in the next 10 minutes, we’ll also throw in a set of steak knives!)

No, I don’t tie my petticoats in the same place every time. This is actually the only one of the three with a real closure, the others still use a straight pin.

And that was all for undergarments! It is so fast and easy to make a dress when you’ve got all the base layers done. I can’t wait until I’ve got that for every era!

But, I ran out of time to turn the last dress link into a Captain America bustle gown for Jordan Con, because having only ~30 minutes to sew a day (on a good day) left me no time to start a completely new era (need new undergarments, patterns, etc).

My plan was to wear my Eliza Schuyler dress for the Jcon costume contest, because hey it’s cosplay if you squint.

And then an utterly brilliant idea hit my brain that I ABSOLUTELY HAD TO MAKE.

So the theme for Jordan Con was The Darkest Timeline. Getting into some fantasy book nerdery here, what if evil timeline Vin – from Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn – was found by the bad guys and made into a Steel Inquisitor, instead of being found by the good guys? And to hide her peasant origins, she goes all-in on wearing ballgowns?

The character in the book does go undercover as a noblewoman, and as such sometimes puts on a ballgown. To get even more nerdy, I hypothesize that she definitely has to be wearing 1840s.

The dresses are described several times as bell-shaped. Can’t get much more bell shaped than 1830s-1850s:

Ok, we know this character definitely isn’t wearing 1830s. 1830s is too damn bonkers of an era (giant sleeves, giant hair). If your character is wearing 1830s, you are going to describe the heck out of it. By leaving out the description of this unique era, it ain’t what you are reading about.

1830s bell-shaped gown. Unfortunately a pinterest link and I can’t find the source.

Whereas by the 1850s, skirts had gotten so big that they needed hoopskirts to keep them nice and big (or hoopskirts were invented so skirts could get bigger. Potato potahto chicken/egg etc). Another name for these is cage crinoline. Now, in the Mistborn world, where people (and especially nobles) have the power to control metal, are you going to surround yourself with a big ol’ cage of it? HECK NO that would just be asking for trouble.

La Mode Parisiennes, Feb 1855. Also know as bell shaped DEATH TRAP.

So by process of elimination that leaves us smack dab in the 1840s. I also wanted to make this dress with as little metal as possible to try and make it more cosplay-accurate (which meant things like eyelets instead of hooks and eyes to close the dress).

So, armed with all my petticoats from my 1830s gown (hooray, no needing to make undergarments!) and 6 yards of black Supima cotton sateen from the epic Joann sale (taffeta is just too damn expensive these days, especially when 1840s is not my favorite era worthy of spending that much) I set off to make this dress in 4 months. I figured even with a non-sleeping baby, I already had all the patterns so fitting shouldn’t take long, and I could just bang the dress together for April. (Spoiler alert, I did, and will be describing the parts of the dress in the forthcoming posts).

Whipping the millinery wire to the buckram. I didn’t trust myself to do this by machine.

I actually screwed up here and didn’t do the wire long enough, so I cut a short piece and overlapped at the ends.

The top being attached to the crown. I ended up not finding any tape to make it work and had a lot of spiky pins in all directions.

Strip of bias fabric around the edges to soften them.

I don’t recall if the strip of fabric around the edges was in the instructions or not, but this is what we did in a previous millinery class. There is an actual product out there made for buckram binding, but I used a bit of leftover thin drapey silk fabric (from my Bubblegum Titanic dress actually). It’s basted on the bottom with long stitches, but it was glued around the top since I couldn’t baste through that right-angle edge.

And then no more photos happened of the construction process (which was glueing on flannel for mull, attaching the outer fabric, and cursing a lot because the pleats wouldn’t lie nicely) because I had to rush to finish (of course).

I used a beautiful copper orange cotton/silk blend as the outer fabric. (The brand is Radiance by Robert Kaufman. Unfortunately they have stopped manufacturing this fabric which makes me so sad, as it was my favorite substitute for silk satin.)

Once it was put together, I quickly threw some decorations onto it! I have very few millinery supplies in my stash, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that the few I had all coordinated together.

The ribbon and flowers came from a booth at the Cañada College – Artistry in Fashion fair (separate purchases in separate years actually). The leaves came from the garment district in New York, and the velvet ribbon is leftover from my De Heere dress. (Seriously, I had copper velvet ribbon that perfectly matched the fabric. This would be hard to match intentionally let alone by accident!)

Pile of decor on a bonnet! Flowers on leaves on feathers, with the stems covered up by a bow. These are all tacked on in strategic places to stay in place.

The inner shirred brim is one of my favorite parts. I actually used that pattern piece upside down here [see comments about unclear pattern instructions], but somehow it still worked out.

The fabric ended up wonky with a leaning seam going up the back. But it’s not noticeable unless I tell you! The bow is also covering some wonk.

The ribbon has a very definite right and wrong side, so I folded it in half up and sewed up the sides to where it touches the bonnet so you only see the pretty decoration. It ended up being just enough to tie a bow (or drape down my back, which I prefer the look of)

And for some commentary on the pattern – I would call this an intermediate-level pattern. It requires a lot of precision to line things up properly (and I didn’t always manage). I have taken an in-person millinery class before which really helped – I think it would be more difficult to do this bonnet with no millinery experience since I didn’t find the instructions beginner friendly.

The biggest issue is that different variations of the pattern pieces are given midway through the pattern, and not right up-front. For example, the cover picture shows an uneven bias binding on the brim (wider in the center getting narrower on the sides). The instructions for cutting this uneven binding are not given in the pattern layout, or the pattern pieces themselves (both of which show a regular bias binding piece), or in the beginning of the instructions for that view. They are given at the bias binding step, which is something like step 7.

The instructions do say to read everything carefully before starting, but it’s hard to visualize what is happening (or exactly what you want) when you are just at the fabric-cutting stage. I wasted fabric cutting out a piece that I ended up not using, because I followed the pattern layout and cut a plain top brim layer, but I had intended to do the pleated top and had to recut.

I would therefore recommend this pattern cautiously – it may not be best if you are an absolute beginner to millinery, and you really do need to read the pattern extremely carefully before cutting (and maybe only cut each piece as you are about to use it, which is way less efficient but less error-prone).

Luckily it’s got enough froof and shine to still be pretty!

For additional accessories –

I bought a lace collar/shawlette/pelerine thingy from ebay. The listing claimed it was extant to the 1840s, although I’m not sure if that really is the case. It definitely is handstitched. The little embroidery bits are actually applique on top of it. I ended up pinning it to each of my shoulders, since otherwise it falls off as I walk.

The black lace gloves are cheapo stretch lace gloves from Amazon (I originally tried to go cheaper from AliBaba, but instead of sending me gloves I received tiny doll shoes. At least it was easy to get a refund?)

So thus armed (and, head-ed?) with my new accessories I went to Dickens Fair with the rest of the Gigot Girl Gang!

Rocking the late 1830s sleeve (where they have moved down the elbow) with La Dauphin Costuming. Man I am jealous of the amount of poof she has there! It’s also a testament to my Pixel 3 camera that it got accurate colors in the weird yellow light of Dickens.

Separated at birth?

This wasn’t even the whole group! But we probably couldn’t have fit any more sleeves in the photo.

I was able to get in another wearing in January at the GBACG open house.

The astute may notice I managed to get a wee bit more decor on the inside of the bonnet.

So sassy, much sleeve, wow

This is a super fun outfit because of how absurd it is, and I’ll be wearing it again in a month for the GBACG 1830s picnic. Now I really want to make early 1830s dresses with EVEN BIGGER sleeves and redonculous hair!